


Of Men and of Rockets

by Semira



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Big Brother Dean, Blood, Brother Feels, Brotherly Love, Cage Trauma, Caring Dean Winchester, Dean is Bad at Feelings, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotionally Repressed Winchesters, Gen, Hallucifer (mentioned), Head Injury, Hell Trauma, Hurt Sam Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, Madlibs, Nightmares, POV Sam Winchester, Platonic Cuddling, Protective Dean Winchester, Season/Series 07, Self-Harm, Sensory Deprivation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-08
Updated: 2015-06-08
Packaged: 2018-04-03 11:54:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4099987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Semira/pseuds/Semira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam's always thought it's this fiction-thing, biting your lip until it bleeds. It seems dramatic and all, but short of tearing off too much dry skin or having really dry lips to start with, it takes more pressure than most people are willing to exert, really, to break the skin of the lip and make it actually bleed.</p><p>The pain of broken skin is absolutely nothing, though, to the feeling of Lucifer's hands rooting around in his innards (with that sort of gleeful detachment that the fallen archangel must have spent millennia cultivating) and tearing out whatever displeases him.</p><p><strong>In other words...</strong> <em>Sam wakes up from a Cage trauma-fueled nightmare and can't shake the dream. Dean helps by turning on the heater in high summer and sweating through it. In the end, there's nothing like a bit of blasphemy to shake the cold in his bones.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Men and of Rockets

Sam's always thought it's this fiction-thing, biting your lip until it bleeds. It seems dramatic and all, but short of tearing off too much dry skin or having really dry lips to start with, it takes more pressure than most people are willing to exert, really, to break the skin of the lip and make it actually bleed.

The pain of broken skin is absolutely nothing, though, to the feeling of Lucifer's hands rooting around in his innards (with that sort of gleeful detachment that the fallen archangel must have spent millennia cultivating) and tearing out whatever displeases him.

It doesn't hold a candle to the words, the fire, the days upon months upon _decades_ of time spent in darkness, without touch or even the ability to move, the times when he would have given anything to be able to hurt himself.

When he feels the sharp pain of broken skin and tastes his own blood, he's still lost in the nightmare for a moment, and he laps at the blood like it's water, tonguing the broken skin just to feel the real, tangible pain of it, because he's not _there_ anymore. He's here with Dean, and sometimes he needs a reminder.

Suddenly there's pressure on his shoulders and warmth on his face, and sound fades back in with all the grace of a sledgehammer to the skull. He hears the creak of the old bed's metal frame before the other sound registers—a low keen, more animal than human.

He realizes, as his awareness returns, that he's the one making the sound. Of course he is. 

One forgets to remain silent in the face of pain when any pride has been torn to shreds decades ago, when silence brings no less or no more suffering than noise. Stoicism is a luxury Sam simply couldn't afford after the first seventy years. It took all his energy just to keep his soul from flying apart.

When he quiets the shameful noise, the pressure around him increases, and his sense of smell is back—oil and leather and alcohol and sweat: Dean. He hears a low, monotonous litany of _fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck oh Sammy fuck, shhhh, damn it, I gotcha,_ and it's funny because Dean sounds like he's the one who spent days on end screaming his lungs out.

Why in the world would Sam have spent so long screaming? He just...

Where is he?

Sam sees white lights and tastes chalk when he sits up with such speed that he slams his skull into Dean's and somehow manages to snap his own jaw shut with the force of his sudden movement.

“Where...?” he rasps.

He takes it back. His voice sounds wrecked.

“We're in a motel, Sammy. Think you had a nightmare.”

Sam sits up more slowly this time. Dean is sitting on the edge of Sam's bed, hips perched there and torso fairly wrapped around Sam, bent at an angle that must be sending awful cramps through his back, but he's not complaining.

“Dean,” Sam says. 

Dean breathes into Sam's hair like he knows Sam needs it, and he says, “Hmm?” so that Sam can feel the rumble of the sound through Dean's chest. It takes him a moment to process the shock at the fact that Dean actually answers. He spares a moment to wonder why. A part of him remembers impossible darkness and _absence_ , and he stops those thoughts before they can continue.

“M'fine,” Sam mutters. “Gonna strain your back, old man.”

“Not old,” Dean whispers. He starts to say something else, but his voice fades out. Sam wriggles uncomfortably in the silence. The room is still dark (too dark—where was the light switch?) and the silence has its own life to it. His breath is coming quick, scraping his raw throat, and he nearly tears himself out of Dean's arms to fumble for the pull-string on the lamp between their beds.

Light floods the room, and Dean swears again, reaching out one of his own hands to grab a wad of Kleenexes from the bedside table. “Damn it,” he's saying as he licks the end of one Kleenex and then presses it to Sam's lips and chin. “What are you doing to yourself?”

Sam realizes at the Kleenexes come away red that his chin is wet with a frothy blend of his blood and saliva.

“How long?” Dean asks.

“Bit it when I woke up, I think,” Sam says, sitting up. In the room there's an ugly chair—a truly hideous pattern on the seat—but it's a kind of ugly Sam's never seen before, and he has to trust that his mind isn't making it up. The dull throb of shredded flesh on the upper right side of his lower lip helps. Dean helps—his presence and his muttered words and the smell of him. It all helps. Sam feels himself returning.

“No... not that. I mean... how long, were you, uh...” Dean closes his eyes, shakes his head. “Forget it. I don't need to know. I just... I mean, when I came back, you told me that... well. _Fuck,_ I'm bad at this. You said I could talk to you back then, and uh... you know. Ditto.”

Sam tries a smile, feels the twinge of pain in his lip.

He doesn't say anything. He can't bring himself to say _centuries, longer than almost any human has lived in recorded history_. He can't even begin to tell Dean the ways in which he was taken apart, put back together, tortured, neglected, violated, tainted, remade. He's too ashamed and dirty to tell Dean that he was owned in every way a body can be owned and thrown away just as easily.

The dream is fading. He keeps forgetting that he had it.

The mind—the human mind, at least—is good like that. There's only so much it can take before it has to divert itself.

On some level, Sam realizes that his nightmares are playing out in Cage-time. The dream felt like months and months, and he isn't sure if that's just how dreams go or if it lends credibility to the idea that he really is back in the Cage with Lucifer.

“Whoa, hey,” Dean's saying, and he's unwrapping himself from Sam so he can sit right in front of him and stare into his eyes.

Sam is having a hard time focusing on Dean. Somewhere over Dean's shoulder, he could almost swear there's another figure. In a register just below Dean's voice there's rattling laughter.

It's warm outside—balmy and humid in true Midwest fashion—well past seventy degrees even at night. In a purely academic sense, Sam knows this. He saw it on the news today. Low of seventy-two, humidity at around seventy. Partly sunny, fifty percent chance of showers in the evening.

The throaty growl of distant thunder confirms the weatherman's surmisings, and a quick glance at Dean's bed reveals that the blankets are gone. Dean was sleeping in a t-shirt and boxers with only the sheet.

Sam is _freezing,_ though. 

The thunder comes again, louder except this time it sounds like laughter and breaking bones and _Sammy—can I call you that?—Sammy, my boy, you don't even know the beginning of what I'm capable of._

Sam read that with brain injury (concussion, whatever the hell else has happened to his head) comes difficulty regulating body temperature.

He knows he's actually cold and isn't just imagining that he's cold, because Dean is swearing and leaning over the edge of the bed to grab his discarded comforter and then reaching toward the base of the lamp where he left the A/C remote. He switches it to heat and runs his hand up and down Sam's arms. Sam's whole body prickles with gooseflesh.

He can't stop shaking.

It's so cold.

Correction: everything else is fine. Sam is the one who's cold.

At least it's light. At least he can see.

Dean settles in beside him, wrapping one arm around Sam and pulling him close with the other. He's sweating like he ran a mile, but Sam is still clammy and shuddering.

“Shh, we're gonna warm you up, little brother,” Dean says. “Gonna get you some water, okay? Be right back.”

Sam makes a noise in his throat when he feels Dean sliding down off the bed, but he focuses on the sound of the water (it drowns out the laughter) and Dean's steady stream of explanations and dry commentary— _Damn carpet, stupid chair, would it kill them to hire a decorator, looks like a hippie exploded in here_ , and then, softer, _getting you some water, Sammy, warm water, Jesus, it's gonna be gross, nothing grosser than lukewarm-anything, really_ —and then Dean's back beside him, and he's right.

The water is disgusting. It tastes like chemicals and sulfur deposits, and it's just the kind of warm that tickles the gag reflex.

Sam drinks it all. It settles heavy in his stomach, and Dean settles in beside him.

Dean reaches out with his left hand, flailing for the trusty old Gideon Bible to be found in musty motel drawers across the continent.

He slings Sam an irreverent grin and pulls a pen from a cup beside the lamp.

Sam almost forgot they used to do Mad Libs with those old things. It had always ended up hilarious—even funnier for the frantic sense that Sam was blaspheming. (He always prayed a little longer those nights.)

Dean opens to a random chapter and writes numbers beside several words, snickering to himself. After a while, he pulls out the motel pad and scribbles some words, tugging the blankets up over the both of them.

The heater's on full blast at the height of summer, Lucifer is laughing somewhere in the distance, and Dean is pink-cheeked with the heat even though the shivers still have Sam in their grip.

“All right, Sammy,” he starts, pen poised. “Gimme a body part, a noun, and a food you can eat with your fingers.”

**Author's Note:**

> I have faith in Dean. I think he knows what nouns are. Written for a truly lovely prompt by [ilovethemoose](http://ilovethemoose.tumblr.com) on [my tumblr](http://semirahrose.tumblr.com/post/119755395153/ive-been-having-trouble-writing-lately-so-i-was). The prompt was: _The first time Sam has a nightmare triggered by Hell memories._ The other fics were only posted on Tumblr and haven't been moved over here yet. I haven't been able to effectively string words together lately, and then this happened when I was supposed to be sleeping. Go figure. /sleep is for the dead Also, I swear the title makes sense! (I actually shortened it, since it was a bit long.)


End file.
